Independent Investigative Journalism and Commentary from New Orleans, LA

Friday, February 15, 2013

A short break...

Part III of the Wisner chronicle is coming but not immediately. Since publishing Part II, I've been getting a lot of ancillary information thrown at me from multiple sources about the conduct of the JV/PSC attorneys so I want to address some of these issues before we move on. I'm conducting a paper chase right now, but I should have some more info. by next week. I promise subsequent posts won't be as complicated as Part II was...I am basically drilling down further into specific items of Part II in regards to conflicts of interest and unethical behavior.

Also, I am toying with the idea of putting this story to moving pixels and creating a short documentary on it. It would be a huge amount of labor but I think this story is so complicated that most people don't understand its gravity and what is currently unfolding. I'm much better at video than the written word so perhaps I can tell the story a little better that way.

What really amazes me, is that I'm the only one really tackling it. The MSM seems to have turned a blind eye to much of this, particularly the items in Part II. I don't know what to make of that....maybe it's just the result of Superbowl/Mardi Gras attention span.

Speaking of Mardi Gras...what a great one it was. I need help in the make up dept. but I tried to pull off an AZ costume:

You might like a movie about media conglomeration called "Orwell Rolls In His Grave."

I saw the director's cut, which is really fucking long, but the extra interviews contain good material.

The picture it painted of the media landscape was pretty messed up.

But it also makes it clearer why, in a town full of good reporters, you are the only one on certain stories.

A friend came over for dinner on Saturday, and one of the things we ended up talking about was the changing nature of work, and the changing nature of made and created things in the built environment.

She mentioned that as a younger woman she had worked as a technician at a big chain car repair franchise. She had no experience when she started; she got the job because her boyfriend was a mechanic. She looked and dressed like a mechanic, and people would ask her questions as if she was one. When they did so, she was fucked.

She talked about how they made their quotas, and mentioned that in addition to the repair-related metrics, there was a terrible standardized measure of how customer-service-y they had been.

This program was called "Empathica", I shit you not. Orwell's nightmare, no joke.

I mentioned a stupid piece of what Douglas Copeland would call "semi-disposible Swedish furniture" I had recently put together.

The screws were a cheap, soft metal from China, and as soon as you tried to screw them into place, they stripped, and you could not get any purchase on them to turn them. Is it possible that the quality of even the semi-disposible furniture is getting worse?

I wound up using drills to make the holes bigger, and then a fucking mallet to bang them in.

If you've seen "Office Space" and remember the PC Load letter tray, you can imagine me building this table. I showed off the resulting masterpiece.

Between my horrible table and descriptions of "Empathica", we all got a bit drunk and laughed our asses off.

Fucked-up cheap-ass screws, and stupid computer programs measuring standardized empathy on the job, are part of the same ugly world of comglomerated, hollowed out media, and a climate where PR flacks out number reporters in most nation's capitals.

Our newspapers still look like newspapers, they still have the outward form of them. But they are like my stupid fucking table; the fundementals aren't solid. The screws don't screw.

And no doubt somewhere there is a department full of chirpy little people with cute noses and fashionable haircuts (their moms paid for) running all potential stories through some "Empathica" matrix to determine the demographic market the story might appeal to, and if that matched what the people marketing the ads needed to see.